Mobilising profits
Ngpay, a start-up firm offering end-to-end mobile commerce services including entertainment, travel, banking, utility bill payments, etc. was launched into the mass market in 2008. According to Sourabh Jain, founder and CEO, Ngpay, they spent more than four years to develop it so that they could provide a user experience that is simple, secure, and highly interactive. Now, Ngpay has RBI compliant financial grade security and works on entry-level handsets and even works across telecom networks.
?When I was completing my under-graduation, I took one semester off to help my uncle in managing his garment exports unit of 200 people. That experience introduced me to the world of entrepreneurship. After completing my engineering degree, I joined Lucent Technologies, but I always harboured the idea of pursuing something on my own.
Thus, I started Ngpay along with a few friends in 2004,? says Jain. However, the road to entrepreneurship was not devoid of challenges for Jain and his firm. The biggest challenge was customer perception, as opposed to popular notion of technology. ?When Ngpay was commercially initiated, very few people could even envision services other than voice calls but then there is so much you can do with a handset and revolutionise the utility of the same. My initial meetings, those days, with clients would emphasise the many opportunities one can explore in this business that could help reinvent the mobile phone handset and make it more user-friendly,? explains Jain.
Later, he got seed funding from Helion Ventures and expanded the business. Today, Ngpay is amongst the largest and fastest growing end-to-end mCommerce services in India. ?The key to our success was our faith in our business. Also, the many viable opportunities the mobile market threw at us made us explore them,? feels Abhijit Bose, VP, Ngpay.
Jain is highly confident about the potential of a business using mobile phones as a platform. ?The adoption of non-voice, non-SMS services are growing exponentially and in all regions of India. Given the large and rapidly growing reach of mobile services, we have a unique opportunity to bypass geographic and infrastructure constraints to bring massive benefits and lifestyle changes to millions of people across India,? believes Jain.
Bose is of the opinion that the mobile channel allows any business to reach over 350Mn consumers instantly with no cost or effort. When compared to PC-based electronic service or physical points-of-sales, the ROI that we can offer to partners and the utility that we can provide to consumers are much higher than the alternatives that they currently have. But the platform has certain limitations too. According to Bose, one of the biggest disadvantage is that many consumers and business partners are either not aware of the possibilities we could explore or are not yet comfortable with the medium. This clearly demands that we need to spend a good amount of time educating the market on the existing capabilities, benefits and security of the channel.
Just a SMS away
Looking for the nearest ATM in a new location? Just SMS your query to an eight-digit number and within seconds, you will get the details about the ATM on your mobile phone. This is one of the services Ziva Software Pvt Ltd, a Bangalore based start-up in the space of mobile search services offers. ?In India, 90 percent of the people do not have GPRS enabled on their mobile handsets and many use basic handsets that aren?t equipped with any fancy features. So SMS, the most common mode of communication is utilised by many and as opposed to a few years ago, many users are now SMS-friendly too. And for such users, it had become imperative, for me to make the services I offer more friendly and conducive. The aim of starting Ziva was to help mobile users find a direct and exact answer to their queries,? says Ajay Sethi, CEO, Ziva Software Pvt Ltd.
Sethi, a software engineer by profession was working in the enterprise software space before starting Ziva. The ambition to build an Indian product company and to create an impact on the society made him turn into an entrepreneur. ?When I started Ziva, the excitement about mobile phones was there and it seemed to be a promising sector. I believed it to be an ideal platform to build a product for the common people,? explains Sethi about the reasons behind the choice. ?Also, the fundamental concepts of search on a mobile phone remained the same with what I was working on, in my previous organisation, so I thought this as the best place to leverage my past experience and expertise to the optimum,? adds Sethi.
He spent about nine months researching, understanding and evaluating the market. But as the founding team did not have any entrepreneurial experience, it was a tough ride for Sethi. ?We were very new to entrepreneurship. So we had to do a though learning about what it really needs to build a start-up. Also, at that time, VC funding in India was very limited. So, we had to sell our products at a faster pace to get initial revenue and keep the company moving. But later when we got enough traction, we stopped doing that,? says Sethi about the initial hiccups.
?In a way, our initial product sales (making our platform accessible to others) helped us. Because the VCs saw a demand in the market for our products, they were willing to fund us,? adds Sethi. The entrepreneurial journey that started with a three member team is now about 15 people strong, offering a plethora of services to the mobile users including mobile content like ? ringtones, wall papers, SMS jokes, local information, stock prices, traffic updates, weather information etc.
Sethi believes that India is an ideal space for mobile startups and several innovations are bound to occur in this space. But Sethi is a little unhappy about the revenue sharing model between the mobile operators and the start-ups in this space. ?Mobile operators in India are much more biased in revenue sharing. It is more favourable for the operators than the start-up firms. Because of this, start-ups tend to receive lower revenue, but as the volumes are high, they are able to manage this,? feels Sethi.
According to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), India is the second-biggest market for wireless services and Indian mobile operators added a record 15.64 million customers in March 09. This shows the huge opportunity on offer for mobile entrepreneurs. The average Indian may not necessarily own a PC, but, most definitely, owns a mobile phone. So the reach and potential that a mobile platform has in store is tremendous!
Ngpay, a start-up firm offering end-to-end mobile commerce services including entertainment, travel, banking, utility bill payments, etc. was launched into the mass market in 2008. According to Sourabh Jain, founder and CEO, Ngpay, they spent more than four years to develop it so that they could provide a user experience that is simple, secure, and highly interactive. Now, Ngpay has RBI compliant financial grade security and works on entry-level handsets and even works across telecom networks.
?When I was completing my under-graduation, I took one semester off to help my uncle in managing his garment exports unit of 200 people. That experience introduced me to the world of entrepreneurship. After completing my engineering degree, I joined Lucent Technologies, but I always harboured the idea of pursuing something on my own.
Thus, I started Ngpay along with a few friends in 2004,? says Jain. However, the road to entrepreneurship was not devoid of challenges for Jain and his firm. The biggest challenge was customer perception, as opposed to popular notion of technology. ?When Ngpay was commercially initiated, very few people could even envision services other than voice calls but then there is so much you can do with a handset and revolutionise the utility of the same. My initial meetings, those days, with clients would emphasise the many opportunities one can explore in this business that could help reinvent the mobile phone handset and make it more user-friendly,? explains Jain.
Later, he got seed funding from Helion Ventures and expanded the business. Today, Ngpay is amongst the largest and fastest growing end-to-end mCommerce services in India. ?The key to our success was our faith in our business. Also, the many viable opportunities the mobile market threw at us made us explore them,? feels Abhijit Bose, VP, Ngpay.
Jain is highly confident about the potential of a business using mobile phones as a platform. ?The adoption of non-voice, non-SMS services are growing exponentially and in all regions of India. Given the large and rapidly growing reach of mobile services, we have a unique opportunity to bypass geographic and infrastructure constraints to bring massive benefits and lifestyle changes to millions of people across India,? believes Jain.
Bose is of the opinion that the mobile channel allows any business to reach over 350Mn consumers instantly with no cost or effort. When compared to PC-based electronic service or physical points-of-sales, the ROI that we can offer to partners and the utility that we can provide to consumers are much higher than the alternatives that they currently have. But the platform has certain limitations too. According to Bose, one of the biggest disadvantage is that many consumers and business partners are either not aware of the possibilities we could explore or are not yet comfortable with the medium. This clearly demands that we need to spend a good amount of time educating the market on the existing capabilities, benefits and security of the channel.
Just a SMS away
Looking for the nearest ATM in a new location? Just SMS your query to an eight-digit number and within seconds, you will get the details about the ATM on your mobile phone. This is one of the services Ziva Software Pvt Ltd, a Bangalore based start-up in the space of mobile search services offers. ?In India, 90 percent of the people do not have GPRS enabled on their mobile handsets and many use basic handsets that aren?t equipped with any fancy features. So SMS, the most common mode of communication is utilised by many and as opposed to a few years ago, many users are now SMS-friendly too. And for such users, it had become imperative, for me to make the services I offer more friendly and conducive. The aim of starting Ziva was to help mobile users find a direct and exact answer to their queries,? says Ajay Sethi, CEO, Ziva Software Pvt Ltd.
Sethi, a software engineer by profession was working in the enterprise software space before starting Ziva. The ambition to build an Indian product company and to create an impact on the society made him turn into an entrepreneur. ?When I started Ziva, the excitement about mobile phones was there and it seemed to be a promising sector. I believed it to be an ideal platform to build a product for the common people,? explains Sethi about the reasons behind the choice. ?Also, the fundamental concepts of search on a mobile phone remained the same with what I was working on, in my previous organisation, so I thought this as the best place to leverage my past experience and expertise to the optimum,? adds Sethi.
He spent about nine months researching, understanding and evaluating the market. But as the founding team did not have any entrepreneurial experience, it was a tough ride for Sethi. ?We were very new to entrepreneurship. So we had to do a though learning about what it really needs to build a start-up. Also, at that time, VC funding in India was very limited. So, we had to sell our products at a faster pace to get initial revenue and keep the company moving. But later when we got enough traction, we stopped doing that,? says Sethi about the initial hiccups.
?In a way, our initial product sales (making our platform accessible to others) helped us. Because the VCs saw a demand in the market for our products, they were willing to fund us,? adds Sethi. The entrepreneurial journey that started with a three member team is now about 15 people strong, offering a plethora of services to the mobile users including mobile content like ? ringtones, wall papers, SMS jokes, local information, stock prices, traffic updates, weather information etc.
Sethi believes that India is an ideal space for mobile startups and several innovations are bound to occur in this space. But Sethi is a little unhappy about the revenue sharing model between the mobile operators and the start-ups in this space. ?Mobile operators in India are much more biased in revenue sharing. It is more favourable for the operators than the start-up firms. Because of this, start-ups tend to receive lower revenue, but as the volumes are high, they are able to manage this,? feels Sethi.
According to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), India is the second-biggest market for wireless services and Indian mobile operators added a record 15.64 million customers in March 09. This shows the huge opportunity on offer for mobile entrepreneurs. The average Indian may not necessarily own a PC, but, most definitely, owns a mobile phone. So the reach and potential that a mobile platform has in store is tremendous!
0 comments:
Post a Comment